Bill Gates Says the Combination of ‘Ctrl + Alt + Del’ Was a Mistake

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and co-founder admitted that the tricky combination of keys used to reboot machines was not well thought out.

Forcing early computer owners to simultaneously press the difficult key combination of Control-Alt-Delete to log on to their machines was a mistake, the Microsoft co-founder said in an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign. The command was originally designed to reboot a PC and on older versions of Windows was used to log-in, but since Windows 8 launched, it has been used to access the task manager bar.

He explained the original idea was to use a taxing key combination to ensure it was difficult for other software to fake a log-in screen and steal passwords.